The objective of this report is to give an account of the origin of the special characters that are now part of the Icelandic orthography, these are þ, á, í, ó, ú, é, ö, æ, ý an ð. The focus is on issues that are relevant to modern Information and Communications Technology. This reports ends by reporting on the effect that computers have had on the use of the above characters.

Much of the background information in this report is given here in English for the benefit of foreigners not familiar with Icelandic circumstances. On many issues of orthography this account is a first hand report where the author has checked the sources himself. Sources consulted are given in the text. This report should only be seen as a draft, it needs to be thoroughly checked and references added. Please contact the author at thorgsi@hotmail.com if you have comments.

Special characters do not exist unless they are part of an orthography. The orthography must have some literature using it, and the literature must have a society that reads and uses it.

The Icelandic special characters were created and have continued to exist to serve the needs of the Icelandic state. This report will therefore begin by giving background information on the formation and history of this state.

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History of Iceland

Throughout most of its history Iceland has been a community of farmers. The pillar of society has been the farmer and his farm, a mostly self-sufficient unit, with its sheep and cows producing food and clothes and an ironwork for producing and mending tools and articles such as horseshoes. Villages did not exist and fishing was conducted from farms. Traditional farming in Iceland can only sustain around 50 000 people, and when the population rose above that figure, plaques and hunger kept it in check. - Contrary to what could be expected, this community of farmers was literate.

It was only in the late 19^th century that the Icelandic population increased with the emerging of villages, reaching 100 000 in the first quarter of the 20^th century and approaching 300 000 at the beginning of the 21^st century.

Iceland was discovered and settled late in the 9^th century, by people commonly known as the Vikings. At that time sea-going immigrants from Scandinavia were building settlements and occupying any land they found uninhabited or poorly defended.

Some of the settlers came from newly occupied and insecure territories, such as Scotland and northern Ireland. Those settlers brought with them Celtic servants and slaves.

The settlement of Iceland was expedited by the establishment of the first kingdom of Norway by king Harold Fairhair. King Harold drove Vikings away from Norway and attacked Viking bases in the Hebrides and the Orkney Islands. One of the exiled Viking leaders was Rolf, who went with his army to Normandy and became the forefather of William the Conqueror.

Local kings and chieftains of Norway faced an ultimatum from King Harold of either fighting him or becoming his subordinates. Those who fought lost, some chose to sail to Iceland.

The settlers were not interested in establishing a kingdom but they nevertheless saw a need for law and order. A parliament (Alþingi) for the whole country was established in year 930 at Þingvellir and a homemade calendar adopted to enable the nobility to meet there each summer at a pre-setdate. There were no permanent buildings at Þingvellir, camps and tents were raised each year and issues resolved under the blue sky. Alþingi had peace-keeping as its primary function but the picture giving of it in numerous Saga accounts is nevertheless like that of a battlefield with application of force only replaced by its demonstration. Relations between settlers were formalised by establishment of chief-doms (goðorð) with local assemblies (þing), on a Norwegian model, passing judgements and enforcing them. One of these assemblies exiled Eric the Red from Iceland, having been previously exiled from Norway, he consequently went to Greenland. His son Leif, born in Iceland, went to America.

After the missionary king Olaf I of Norway, threatened a trade embargo on Iceland and killing of hostages, and when a substantial armed force displayed itself at Alþingi in year 1000 demanding Christian legislation, the parliament adopted Christianity as the state religion. At first the new religion was not strictly enforced, but in time it brought with it Latin writing, two bishoprics and a number of monasteries. For centuries, the catholic church had to fight the nobility over control of its churches, the priests and land. Papal orders of celibacy for priests and bishops were ignored and so were orders on building cathedrals of stone.

Iceland differed from other states in Europe in not having a king, but it also lacked an administrative unit for executing the law passed by the parliament which often brought with it lawlessness and unrest. Iceland was divided into 36-39 chief-doms, but in the 13^th century only a handful of Chiefs had through marriage, bribe and war gained control of all of them, and each fought for total supremacy. One of these was the writer Snorri Sturluson. He wrote the famous Heimskringla, that gives the history of the Norwegian kingdom where he uses the ancient Scaldic poetry as his main source of information. He also wrote a textbook on poetry, that was widely copied and used by poets in a tradition (rhymes) that only ended when nationalistic patriots of the 19^th century (Jónas Hallgrímsson but also many others) replaced it with modern poetry.

The fight between the chieftains ended by one of them, supported by the king of Norway winning decisive battles, . Consequently the parliament accepted a treaty with the King of Norway 1262-1264, stating that Iceland would become part of his kingdom. However, all officials in Iceland were to be from the families of the old chieftains (goðar).

Iceland became part of the Kalmar union, formed by Denmark, Norway, Sweden 1397. When it broke up, Norway and its North-Atlandic islands: Iceland, Faroe Islands, Greenland, Shetland Islands and the Orkney Islands stayed parts of the Danish kingdom. In the meantime, the Black Death killed 50% of the population of Norway and the infrastructure of that country collapsed. Peripheral populations were left to fend for themselves. The Shetland Islands and the Orkneys were given away, with marriage to Scotland in the 15^th century and during the same century, while no ships sailed to Greenland, the population that Eric the Red brought with him to Greenland, already under pressure from Inuits (Eskimos) coming from Canada, disappeared.

Iceland became Lutheran, after the catholic bishop of Northern Iceland (Jón Arason) and two of his sons, were executed in 1550, after having led an armed rebellion against the new faith and for having sought support from the German emperor against the Danish king.

After the Napoleon wars, where Denmark supported Napoleon, but Sweden fought him, the victors handed Norway over to Sweden 1814, while Iceland stayed part of the Danish kingdom. The Norwegians started soon after 1814 to build a new orthography for their language, as the common Norse/Icelandic tradition had been discontinued after the Black Death of the 15^th century. Norway became a fully independent kingdom in 1905.

Independence was obtained 1918 for Iceland and a republic was formed in 1944. This can be seen as result of a growing nationalism in the 19^th century but the climate created during WW1 helped enable it. When the victors, as part of the Versailles treaty organised voting for the Danish speaking population on the German-Danish border if they would continue to be part of Germany, it was done on the principle that every population should decide on its own fate and the neutral Denmark thus reclaimed part of a North German territory it had previously lost to Bismarck in the 19^th century. The Danes also led the Icelanders vote on independence, which they overwhelmingly did, in 1918. The two states Denmark and Iceland, shared a king and a ministry for foreign affairs. These ties between Iceland and Denmark were broken in WW2 when Germany occupied Denmark and England occupied Iceland. A fully independent state of Iceland was formed in year 1944.

Even if Iceland was for a long time part of the Danish kingdom, it had through all its history some autonomy. The legislation was Icelandic and Alþingi kept meeting to interpret the law and pass judgements.

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The oldest orthography in Iceland

With Christianity and the monasteries, writing of Icelandic with Latin letters was introduced. The first books serve the purpose of stabilising the state and its new religion. Thus a resolution was passed by Alþingi to write down the law of the State in 1117-1118. The law had earlier been remembered and recited each year by the highest official of the state: the ‘law-speaker’. The history of the country and its governmental structure and its division into chief-doms was recorded and the Book of Settlement was written that documents what land was claimed by whom. It also gives the names and origin of the settlers and of their offspring. Religious writing did not stay in the Latin language only, as accounts of the lives of holy saints were translated.

Near the middle of 12^th century the need was felt to stabilise the orthography and an essay was written where a proposal for an Icelandic alphabet was given and explained. The introduction of the First Grammarian in Icelandic with my English translation is in Appendix B of this document. Many of his proposals became standard practice, or were already so when his essay was written, but through all times individual writers have chosen their own variations.

The author of the essay is for convenience called the First Grammarian and his essay The First grammatical treatise. (Some younger treatises also exist, but none of equal standing.) The First Grammarian is probably one of the numerous scholars, educated in France, Germany or England mentioned in the accounts of the Icelandic history. On the one hand we do not know what most of them produced but on the other hand we have thousands of manuscripts in which the author is too humble to give his/her name.

Some of the peculiarities of the oldest Icelandic writing are listed below:

The First Grammarian demonstrated convincingly, that several vowels were needed in the Icelandic alphabet in addition to the five Latin vowels: a, e, i, o, u.

He added the following vowels with accent: á é í ó ú ý

Without accent he added y o; e; (o with ogonec and e with ogonec)

For the purpose of this report I have simplified the proposals of the FG and put details of marginal interest to the later development of the orthography into Appendix A. The following is however of general interest, because similar issues are known in modern orthography of other nations.

The First Grammarian was not introducing phonetic spelling. His alphabet was to include only what was needed to make the necessary distinctions and provide non-ambiguity in meaning, needed for instance in law-texts, an example he takes. To demonstrate the need for new vowels he used minimal pairs like: sár, sér, sór, súr where each word has a different meaning,

The letter y that the First Grammarian proposed was a new Latin letter that he saw as a ligature of "u" and "i" with the name "y" (the sound itself). The Greek letter used by the Latinists in Greek words he did not want to use. In Icelandic today, the name for this letter is nevertheless Upsilon (the Greek name) but it is considered to be a Latin letter.

The Grammarian says the difference between letters, with and without accent marks are similar to the difference between the short and long Greek vowels, like Epsilon and Eta, or Omicron and Omega. Each of his accented vowels was therefore to be seen as separate letters.

The first Grammarian did not put a dot on the ’i’, and neither did others, but the First Grammarian gave dotted vowels a special meaning. Nobody followed his proposal on the use of dots (they were for nasal sounds) and details are in the Appendix. This situation with a dot-less i and an i with a dot, being different vowels, exists in the young Turkish Latin orthography today.

The first Grammarian stated that the Latin alphabet mostly needed added vowels but its repertoire of consonants was mostly adequate. He added the letter þ (Þorn) into the Icelandic Latin alphabet on the model of the Anglo-Saxon orthography . He also added the letter ‘Eng’ for the "Eng" sound. Examples of the use of Eng can be found in Icelandic manuscripts, but it never became widespread. A letter with the name Eng was introduced in the Sami orthography in the 19th century. The First Grammarian did not add the letter Eth into the orthography. The letter Eth was introduced in the following century in place of Þorn inside words.

The Grammarian proposed the following alphabetical ordering of consonants, with small letters before capitals, in addition he proposed a unique name for each of the capitals listed: (more details in Appendix A)

b, B, c, K, d, D, f, F, g, G, "Eng", h, l, L, m, M, n, N, p, P, r, R, s, S, t, T, x, þ

Medieval manuscripts use large initial capitals in the beginning of a paragraph. Noticing that most capitals have different glyphs, the FG proposes to make use of this to denote double writing of consonants. Thus he wrote Ubbe as UBe. The name of b he gives as be (as we know it), but he proposes the name ebb for B and similar for other letters, for instance ees for gs and ess for S. Some consonants are never doubled, like h and þ, but when they are, he is concerned that the capital glyph must be clearly different from the small glyph. Therefore he suggests using c for the small letter and K for the capital version of the same letter. Actually he wanted to use the glyph for Greek Kappa for the capital, (this glyph was used for the Greenlandic Kra in the 20th century). The capital and small versions of s are different in his writing because his small s is the long Gothic s (an f without the stroke), but the capital is the s we know.

This use of capitals was well known in Icelandic manuscripts and its purpose was to save space, to shorten text and "to make the parcment last longer" as stated by the First Grammarian. This ‘data-compression’ is believed to have been unique to Iceland, but the following was known all over Europe:

The First Grammarian saw x, z and & as short notations for "ks", "ts" and "et" (Latin for "and") and did not forbid their use but he said the frequency of z was too low to justify its use. Incidentally he says that the letter z is originally a ligature for the Hebrew letters "deleth" and "sade" that he says entered Latin writing because of frequent quotations of Hebrew words. I have no knowledge of Hebrew, nor if this information is correct, but it conflicts with what encyclopaedias say, that y and z entered Latin from writing Greek words in Latin texts.

The First Grammarian used many abbreviations, and even if these are common in all Mediaeval manuscripts they were especially frequent in Icelandic texts. A macron (a horizontal stroke) was commonly written above vowels to denote that either n or m should be inserted. Special signs for the very frequent "er" and "ar" were used and strokes through consonants to denote abbreviation of common words (for instance a Thorn with a stroke could be used for the frequent "þat").

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The literature of Iceland through the centuries

Rather than giving the full story of Icelandic literature and its orthography. I will exemplify it by taking one work from each century. All the texts are plain modern Icelandic, (allowing for ‘poetic grace’) only the spelling differs from what is used today.

12^th century

From the middle of this century I chose the First Grammatical treatise, even if only copies of it exist, its orthography is explained in its text. A photocopy of the best copy of this essay is printed in the book "The First Grammatical Treatise", University of Iceland, Publications in Linguistics 1, 1972. It contains a critical discussion of its content by Hreinn Benediktsson a professor of at the Icelandic University. Hreinn is a widely recognised authority on the First Grammarian and academically a descendant of Rasmus Rask, discussed below. His book is available from Bóksala stúdenta and can be ordered on the Internet. In an appendix to this report, I have included my translation of the beginning of the text of the FG. English translation of all the text can by found by Hreinn in his book.

13^th century

From the latter half of this century I chose the King book of Eddaic poems (Codex Regius of the Eddaic Poems), a world famous manuscript containing ancient heathen poetry, but using contemporary orthography. This single manuscript contains the bulk of preserved pre-Christian poetry preserved in Northern Europe. Its text has been published in many widely available books and I will not single any one of them out. Below is given the text of the 42^rd strophe of Völuspá with the original spelling. More texts from this manuscripts can be found at the web site: http://www.hi.is/~eybjorn/ugm/vsp3.html

Abbreviations are within parentheses.

Gól u(m) asom
gullinca(m)bi
sa uecr havlþa
at hiarar at h(er)iafaudrs. ( here d is in place of þ)
eN aNaR gelr (the capitals are in place of nn and rr)
f(yr) iorð neðan (the ð is written as d with stroke, in place of þ)
sót raúþ(r) háni (here þ is used)
at saulom heliar. (this au and all the others are ligatures)

This text above is taken from a college book by Árni Böðvarson "Handritalestur og gotneskt letur" that has photographs of samples from various manuscripts for teaching their reading. It does not have an ISBN number and I doubt that it is available outside Iceland, but it may be available from Bóksala Stúdenta. The text from the 14^th, 16^th and17^th century is also taken from that book. I do not guarantee the accuracy of the text, but errors that I may have added are not likely to affect conclusions on the use of characters.

14^th century

This was the century of large vellum collection of Sagas and information of any kind. From this century I chose Möðruvallabók. This particular collection of Saga manuscripts is of such quality that it is often used as base for publication and translations. The text here is taken from the book by Árni Böðvarsson

Nv var hall(freðr) m(eð) k(onun)gi v(m) hrið & orti v(m) h(ann) flock & bað ser hlioðs. k(onun)gr q(vaz) e(igi) hlyða vilia. hall(freðr) s(egir) þu munt þ(vi) raða en tyna mun ek þa þei(m) fræðu(m) e(r) þu lez m(er) ke(n)na ef þu vill e(igi) hlyða quæðinu & e(r)o þau fræði ecki skalldligri e(r) þu lez mik nema en quæðit e(r) þat e(r) ek hefi v(m) þik ort Olafur k(onun)gr m(æ)l(t)i san(n)liga mattu heita vandræða skalld. & s(ka)l heyra quæðit.

(Here ð is written regularly, the difference between it and d is only a very small stroke, or loop, out of the neck of a d)

15^th century

From the beginning of this century I chose a manuscript of the Law book Jónsbók (The more recent Skálholtsbók AM 354). This law book was ratified by Alþingi in 1281. The law was based on Norwegian law (1274) but in addition it contained provisions from the law code of the Old Icelandic Republic. Usually the younger copies of Jónsbók are not of interest to publishers, as they want to get close to the original 13^th century edition, which gives the false impression that this book does not belong to the 14^th, 15^th, 16^th and 17^th century. Jónsbók remained in force, practically without amendment until absolute Danish monarchy was established in 1662. It was popular, and there is no medieval text that has been copied as often (more than 200 manuscripts still exist) and it was the first secular book printed in the 16^th century. A text sample is below, taken from a photocopy in a booklet published by the Arnemagnean Institute in Reykjavik, ISBN 9979-819-64-12.

Þat er firir bodít af guds halfu at nockur madr hafi gudsifia sinn at likamslosta en þrífalltar eru gudsífjar. Hinar fyrstu ero millum barns er skírt er & þes er skirir e(da) þvi helldr til skírnar. Adrar gudsifíar ero & milli þes sem barn skirer e(da) þvi helldr til skírnar eda undir biskups hond & fedgína barns þridíu er i millum barnsins er skirt er & kiotligs barns þess er skirde eda til skirnar heldr.

(The Eth and the accents have disappeared. There are accents on small i-s, but they are only the dots that are today on any small i. Theses accents (dots) are sometimes missing, as they are not really needed. Their function is to indicate in a cluster of r-s, n-s or m-s that there is a small i there.)

16^th century

From this century I chose the New Testament, the first printed book in Icelandic 1540, translated from the German bible of Luther 1520 (The whole Bible was printed 1586). This book was printed in Copenhagen while Jón Arason was still defending the catholic faith in Iceland. It was a part of the Lutheran message to translate the Bible from Latin and having sermons in the native language, but it was nevertheless Jón Arason who imported the first printing press to Iceland.

A text sample below:

San(n)liga San(n)liga seige eg ydr, Huer h(an)n geingr eige in(n) vm dyrnar i sauda husit, Helldr stigr h(an)n in(n) med odru(m) hætti sa er þiofr, & spilluirke, en(n) sa sem geingr in(n) um dyrnar, h(an)n er hirder saudan(n)a fyrer h(onu)m lykr dyra vordrin(n) vpp, & saudernir heyra h(an)ns rodd, & h(an)n kallar sina saude med nafne, leider þa & vt, & þa h(an)n hefer sina saudi vt latid, geingr h(an)n fram(m)e fyre þ(ei)m, sauderner fylgia h(onu)m & epter, þuiat þ(ei)r þeckia h(an)ns rodd en odrum an(n)arligu(m) fylgia þ(ei)r eigi epter

This text is taken from the book by Árni Böðvarson "Handritalestur og gotneskt letur".

17^th century

From this century I choose the poem Lilja (the Lilly) in the Icelandic Verse Book (vísnabók) printed by Bishop Guðbrandur 1612, using the printing press of Jón Arason the last catholic bishop. The Lutheran missionaries needed texts in the native language to sing at sermons in place of the Latin Hymns. Such Psalms were produced and printed immediately after the conversion, but Bishop Guðbrandur was critical of the broken language of direct translation of Danish and German texts and he had new psalms composed. In this book he is competing with the popular secular poetry (the rhymes) using the traditional meter for Christian content. He included the poem Lilly, even if it was Catholic work. The Lilly (a name for Virgin Mary) was widely recognised as a masterpiece in meter and language. It appears to be almost plain text, even if using the very difficult dróttkvætt meter of traditional scaldic poetry.

- From the Lilly 18^th strophe

Audgint miøc þui Eua trude,
aat hun Blom enn tapade Soma, (aa is everywhere a ligature.)
og til med sier Adam teygde,
vann hann þad er visse bannat:
Vgde hann ad Eua stygdest,
ef neitade hann Bæn ad veita, (Nouns are capitalised, like in modern German)
so gat Fiande j fyrst blindad,
Fedgin vor med nogu Daare

(For an example of handwriting in the 17^th century where dieresis are occasionally used, see the web site http://servefir.ruv.is/passiusalmar/ with the original of the Passio Hymns by Hallgrímur Pétursson.)

18^th century

From this century I chose the book of sermons by Bishop Vidalín (Vídalíns postilla). It was first printed in the Northern bishopric at Hólar 1718 and it become so popular that it was reprinted 10 times during the century. Bishop Vídalín was admired for his rhetoric and use of non-distorted plain language. In a poem he prays to God that his mother tongue may manage to spread the message of God, clear and free from error.

Gief þu ad moodurmaalid mitt (an aa-ligature is used)
Drotten þess eg beide
Fra allre villu klaart & kvitt
krossens ord þitt wtbreide (the uu-ligature ‘w’ is used)
Umm landed hier til heidurs þier
hellst mun þad blessan vallda
Medan þijn naad vort lætur laad
lide og bygdum hallda

In the next century this book stayed popular with a new orthography, influenced by a spelling reform by Eggert Ólafsson, reintroducing the accent marks of the First Grammarian (but not the Eth).

There were so many copies printed of this book that original editions can still be found in the homes of many Icelanders today (I have one). It has recently been republished but I have not checked if that edition contains any information on the original spelling.

19^th century

From this century I choose the poem Gunnarshólmi by Jónas Hallgrímsson, published in Fjölnir 1838, a yearly journal that he and a group of Icelandic students and intellectuals started in Copenhagen, giving the Icelanders a 'localised’ version of contemporary European thinking. The work of Jónas marks the beginning of new time in Icelandic poetry and literature. Fjölnir adopted the letter Eth and also used a modern font for printing. The letters y, ý and é were not used for the printing of Gunnarshólmi:

A sample is below:

Hugljúfa samt eg sögu Gunnars tel,
þar sem ég undrast enn á köldum söndum
lágan að sigra ógna bilgju ólma
algrænu skrauti príddan Gunnarshólma.
Þar sem að áður akrar huldu völl
ólgandi Þverá veltur yfir sanda;
sólroðin líta enn hin öldnu fjöll
árstrauminn harða fögrum dali granda;
flúinn er dvergur, dáin hamratröll,
dauft er í sveitum, hnipin þjóð í vanda;
enn lágum hlífir hulinn verndarkraptur
hólmanum þar sem Gunnar snjeri aptur.

Photographs of the original text of poems by Jónas as published, with information on Jónas and English translations by Dick Ringler of the Unicersity of Wisconsin can be found at: http://www.library.wisc.edu/etext/Jonas/Gunnar/Gunnar.html

Pictures of Jónas handwriting are also given, and are interesting as he is among the first users of the Eth in modern hand-writing. This is the first time small Eth and "d with strokes" are written differently. Jónas uses many variations of Eth, starting with a d with a "curly" top, d-s with strokes can be seen but they may be corrections for d-s that he sometimes erroneously writes in place of ð-s.

20^th century

From this century I chose the work of Halldór Laxness, a Nobel price winner in literature 1955. He introduced his own personal orthography, more phonetic than the official one, but he did not add letters or delete any of the letters discussed here (see later on the letter z). His spelling did not win support, even if all his very popular books were using it. A text example is below, the first sentences of his book Sjálfstætt fólk (Independent People, 1934-1936):

"Íslenskar bækur skýra frá því, að hér á landi hafi snemma dvalist vestrænir menn og skilið eftir sig krossa, klukkur og aðra þvílíka gripi, sem notaðir eru til galdurs. Í latneskum heimildum eru þeir menn nafngreindir sem siglt hafi híngað af vestrænum löndum á öndverðum dögum páfadómsins. Hét þeirra fyrirliði Kólumkilli hin írski, særíngamaður mikill. Í þá daga voru hér landgæði með afbrigðum á Íslandi. En þá er norrænir menn settust hér að, flýðu hinir vestrænu galdursmenn landið, og telja fornrit að Kólumkilli hafi í hefndarskyni lagt á þjóð þá hina nýju að hún skyldi í þessu landi aldrei þrífast, og fleira í þeim anda, sem síðar hefur mjög þótt gánga eftir. Laungu síðar snerust norrænir menn á Íslandi frá réttum sið og hneigðust að töfrum óskyldra þjóðflokka:"

Halldór was a pioneer in that he had one of the Icelandic Sagas m printed with modern spelling, which was seen by many as blasphemy. Old manuscripts and saga litterature, for public consumption used to be printed using three extra vowels, discussed below, based on an artificially reconstructed orthography of the 13^th century.

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Special letters, the story

After this long introduction I can give an overview of the origin of the special characters that are now used in Icelandic orthography. I will not give all variants of all letters that existed and were used, not even in the books listed. It is not until the 18^th century that a consistent spelling can be expected from a writer and the letters listed are only those that are most frequent for the given vowel.

The most authoritative source on spelling through the centuries, is a chapter that Stefan Karlsson the former director of the Arnemagnean Institute has written in the book "Íslensk þjóðmenning" (I need to add references to it). Most of the information below can be checked by comparing to his text, which has a summary in English..

The table below gives an example of how things might be written in the given century. I want to add the note that even if I have not seen printed books using dieresis or double accents for aa, uu and oo, all the hand-written letters and manuscripts from the 17^th and 18^th century that I have consulted, use them.

1950	1850	1750	1650	1550	1450	1350	1250	1150
Prose	Poetry	Rhetorc	Psalms	Bible	Law	Sagas	Edda	Grammar
Laxnes	Jónas	Vídalín	Guðbr	Oddur	Jón	Möðrv
á	á	aa	aa	aa	a	a	a (á)	á
ð	ð	d	d	d	d	ð	ð/þ	þ
é	je	ie	ie	ie	e	e	e (é)	é
í	í	ij	ij	i	i	i	i (í)	í
ó	ó	oo	o	o	o	o	o (ó)	ó
ú	ú	uu	u	u	u	u	u (ú)	ú
ý	í	yy	y	y	y	y	y (ý)	ý
þ	þ	þ	þ	þ	þ	þ	þ	þ
æ	æ	æ	æ	æ	æ	æ	e; (é;)	é;
ö	ö	ø/ó	ø/ó	o	o	au	au(áu)	o;

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The Vowels until 1750

The Edda manuscript frequently uses capitals for double consonants and it also makes some use of accent marks. I have put the accented vowels into parenthesis, because the accent marks are used so irregularly and their primary function may be for marking stressed words rather then denoting special characters. In the Saga collection (Mödruvallabook) there is hardly any use of accent marks.

Even if most writers of manuscripts make some use of accents, only very few use them consistently in the way the first Grammarian proposed and they fell out of use before 1400.

When the accents were not simply dropped, they were replaced by writing double vowels. This should be familiar to English speakers. The Icelandic word "bók" would thus be spelt like a "book" and the Icelandic word "tré" would be "tree" (same words, same meaning as in English).

The letter á became aa or áá (also as ligatures) and the aa-ligature is sometimes used in the Law-book (but not any of the other double vowels). Double accents or double dots were in later texts put on the two a-s, probably to mark that these were two letters, (like the two dots on ij) and this seems to have led to a single vowel with two dots (dieresis) which was usual in handwriting in the 17-18^th century.

In early printing the repertoire of characters must have been limited to some extend to what was common in Danish and German printing fonts. This may be the reason for the aa-ligature frequently printed even if other ‘double vowels’ are not, because aa is also a Norwegian/Danish letter and has become å in modern Norwegian (1917) and Danish orthography (1948). This seem to have been the situation in the printing of the New Testament and the Lilly.

The e with ogonec was seen by the First Grammarian to be a kind of ae ligature, as he saw the ogonec as denoting an a (he says it is). In traditional writing of Latin proper, the e with oconec and æ were used to denote the same letter and in Iceland the e with ogonec was naturally replaced by æ.

The o with ogonec (known as o with "kvist" in Norway and "lykkja" in Iceland) may be the FG's own invention, as Hreinn states it is not known elsewhere, except in Norway. Norwegian and Icelandic orthography are often too close to be distinguishable and many manuscripts preserved in Norway were written by Icelanders or imported from Iceland. The o with ogonec was interpreted as a kind of ao ligature, but it was more frequently replaced by au or av, sometimes as ligatures. Later this letter became recognised as the Icelandic variant of the Danish ø or the German ö and was printed and written like that. In Danish handwriting ø is given as ó and both ó and ò can be found in handwriting and printing in place of ø.

The é and í did eventually not become ee and ii (nor ë and ï), but were written as je (or ie) and ij.

The letters y and ý in modern Icelandic are pronounced like the letters i and í. The disappearance of y in English was one of side-effects of the "great vowel shift" and a similar vowel shift for long vowels took place in Icelandic. In writing of Icelandic the letters y and i were already being confused with each other 500 years ago.

In handwriting it can be quite difficult to see the difference between ý, written ÿ and ij, which would be pronounced the same and look almost identical.

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The Consonants until 1750

Even if Þorn was nowhere in use except in Iceland after 1500 when the English stopped using it, the printers of all Icelandic text had a printing-glyph made for it. They also made a special printing-glyph for an f that had developed in Iceland out of insular script from England/Ireland,(the same as þ). Other glyphs for Icelandic characters originated from mainstream Europe.

Eth is is only used word-initially in Icelandic and never at the beginning of words. Þorn can always be used in its place without confusion as was done in the oldest manuscripts.. The examples in my table are typical for the development. The Eth replaced Þorn inside words and was later replaced with a d. The Eth was written like a d with a stroke through it, or phrased differently: the less frequent d was written like "an Eth without a stroke" as the Caroline d with a straight leg was about to disappear when ð was introduced.

Þorn is the only Icelandic special character that is consistently used from the beginning of writing in Iceland to present time. It is difficult to find manuscripts, private letter or a book without it. I do not know of any instances in manuscripts were it is replaced word-initially by anything else with one exception: As an initial at the beginning of a paragraph, the capital d with stroke or Ð was used in place of Þ in a small percent of Norwegian and Icelandic Medieval manuscripts. I must also add that using a different glyph word-initially and another glyph at the end of a syllable for the same letter, is standard practice for the letter s, in the Fracture (gothic) font. Thus Þorn and Eth might be seen as the same letter in such a font, but this is hardly relevant as the Eth was re-introduced about the same time that Icelanders stopped using Fracture-fonts.

I have only seen one single example of a th for þ in a manuscript. Surprisingly, it is the First Grammarian himself, introducing it into the alphabet who wanted to standardise the names for the Latin consonants and wanted to replace the name Þorn (Thorn) with The to harmonise it with the names be, ce, de etc. He has written the new name with a Th and not with a Þ (The original manuscript of the First Gramarian is not preserved. The preserved copy does not use the orthography of the First Grammarian but the names are however likely to be copied from the original)

Even if Iceland was for a long time part of the Danish kingdom the letter Þorn and Icelandic naming conventions were alien to the Danish population and Icelanders living in Denmark localised their names. An example is a Danish sculpture whose father was an Icelandic Þorvaldur whose son Bertil would be Þorvaldsson, but the name became Bertil Thorvaldsen. A number of such family names have been imported back into Iceland where strangely enough the Th is pronounced with a t and never like a Þorn. The names Thór and Þór are therefore different names in Iceland. Foreign names spelt with are Th are often not conceived as being with a Þorn, for instance is the name of Margret Thatcher pronounced as if it was written Tatcher, even ef Icelanders should have no problem with pronouncing it correctly as Þatcher.

The Eth, the accents and use of capitals inside words disappeared from Icelandic writing about the same time (1400). When bishop Vidalín published his sermons in1712, a relatively stable writing system had developed, preserving the distinction between vowels by using dieresis (usual in handwriting, sometimes double accents rather than two dots) or using double vowels.

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Spelling reforms after 1750

In the year 1762, Eggert Ólafsson a "national independence hero" initiated a spelling reform by writing on the need of consistency and by formulating new rules for spelling. He reintroduced the accent marks (in place of dieresis), but not the Eth. In addition to keeping the y and ý, he proposed re-introducing another version of æ, that had also been proposed by the First Grammarian (the oe ligature). This addition of a letter did not win favour, but the accent marks came into common use.

The Eth (or d with stroke) was re-introduced in the 19^th century by a Danish linguist, Rasmus Rask, and taken up by the most prominent literary figures of the time, Jónas being the most influential of these. They also introduced modern fonts for printing.

Rasmus Rask was among the founders of the linguistic theory of reconstructing the Indo-European language. He lived in Iceland 1813-15 and worked on his 1818 treatise on the Origin of Old-Norse which enabled Jakob Grimm in 1822 to put forward his well known Grimm's law which relates letters (sounds) in German, English and Icelandic to letters in a reconstructed Old-Germanic language (information on Grimm's law is found in any Encyclopaedia). According to Grimm's law the letter d in High German corresponds to a th-sound in English and Icelandic. This holds true in beginning of words like in: ding-thing-þing. It also holds true inside words if the spelling of the First Grammarian is employed. Thus the German "werden" should in Icelandic correspond to "verþa", but it was being spellt "verda", until Rask "re-introduced" the letter ð for the voiced th-sound actually being pronounced.

Rask proposed to the Icelandic Literary Society in 1828 that Eth be used in its publications. Rask was among the founders of this Society and its first president in 1816 (Hið íslenska bókmenntafélag) and this was approved. The very academic journal "Skírnir" of this society is still being published and is the oldest of its kind in Europe, perhaps the world.

Rasmus also influenced the Norwegian priest Stockfleth to use a one-sound-one-symbol-principle, for a new Sami orthography, using a d with stroke for an Eth sound and a letter Eng for an ng-sound, but t with stroke was used for the Þorn-sound. Even if the Northern Sami language and Icelandic are un-related, their pronunciation and sound-system is remarkably similar. (I need references for this information)

The linguist and professor Konráð Gíslason wrote new spelling rules for Icelandic and wanted to base it on modern pronunciation. Konráð was among the founders of Fjölnir. Rask on the other hand wanted to keep distinctions of Old-Norse pronunciation in modern Icelandic spelling, thus he introduced a second version of æ (like Eggert had done) and he added a new accent, replacing é with è. Fjölnir used this spelling for its first edition, but then it chose to go for the spelling of Konráð Gíslason and removed the letters é, y and ý as exemplified by the poem Gunnarshólmi 1838 (quoted earlier). Both camps could accept Eth, as it could both be seen as closer to a modern phonetic spelling and to Old-Norse.

The spelling of Rasmus Rask became the official spelling taught in the only college of Iceland at the time, but the second æ (the French oe-ligature) proofed to be too difficult to put into the correct places and was soon abandoned.

In the Faroe Island, which has a languages closely related to Icelandic, an orthography close to the Icelandic one was introduced in the 19^th century. The accented vowels were used and the Eth, but not the Þorn. There was no older Faroese tradition to replace.

In the 20^th century, the same issues as of the 19^th century were being debated.

The writer Halldór Laxness printed his books using a spelling close to that of Fjölnir, but did not remove the letters é, y and y. His phonetic spelling did not add any information to the text, because his changes only affected spellings where there already was a one to one correspondence between the pronunciation and the text. This reform did not win public support, with one exception concerning the letter z.

The last successful major orthography reform in Icelandic was 1973, when the letter z was deleted from official spelling of words and replaced by an s. I have not mentioned this letter before, except stating that the First Grammarian did not want to use it. In the 20^th century, using the spelling of Rasmus Rask it stood for an original "ts" where the t was no longer pronounced. The difficulty in introducing this clear improvement, and the long time it took to win popularity, has discouraged any further proposals for major improvements of the Icelandic orthography to be put forward.

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Effect of modern technology after 1975

Typewriters did not put pressure on the orthography of the Icelandic language. The accent marks were easy to put on vowels, using two strokes, a ‘dead accent’ and the vowel in question. Those who imported and sold typewriters had special keys with the special letters þ, æ, ð and ö added to the English Querty-keyboard. The market for typewriters was relatively big, as touch-typing was part of the curriculum of a high percent of school-children and because typed essays were needed in all higher education, most students had their own private typewriter.

Iceland adopted computer technology faster than most other countries in the world. The first computers posed no immediate threat to Icelandic orthography because how primitive they were. At first they were mostly used for numerical calculation, they could only write upper-case English letters and they were not used for serious word-processing in any language.

When the US-ASCII 7-bit table was created that added lower-case letters and punctuation marks, serious use of computers for handling text could take off. There was room in the 7-bit table for addition of special characters and special standardised ASCII versions were made for other Nordic countries, but it became clear that this could not be done for Icelandic as the number of special characters was too great. This did not mean that Icelanders did not use their special letters in 7-bit word-processing, but it meant that many different un-standardised patches were made to software and hardware to enable computers that could really not handle this large character repertoire to do so. These patches and special solutions were economically possible, because of how centralised computer processing used to be. There were only few hardware and software providers, first among these was IBM that set up a special localisation centre in Iceland, and there were only few large users, first among these a "data central" SKÝRR set up by the Icelandic State and the city of Reykjavík, that handled all public records and their processing.

The decentralisation of computer processing and lower prices of computers meant that making special software or hardware patches for each computer sold, could not be economically feasible. It was therefore of utmost importance for Icelandic special characters to enter the main-stream Latin 1 8-bit code table, for which IBM had its 850 compatible code-table and on which Microsoft based its Western PC 1250.

Presently the main problem with text-processing in Icelandic are because of "special-solutions" that were adopted and given time to entrench themselves, before Latin 1 and the 850 code table became available. Among these is the code-table 861 that IBM-Iceland created by making patches to a Portuguese code table. It has taken time to phase this code-table out and it is still giving Icelanders incompatibility problems, because of legacy files and equipment.

A more serious problem is with Apple, that has not adopted a code-table compatible with Latin 1 and not included the Icelandic characters þ/Þ, ð/Ð and ý/Ý into its standard Roman character set. Apple computers would not have any market in Iceland if Apple-Iceland had not made up for this defect, by providing in addition to a localised Icelandic character set, a fully localised Icelandic version of its operating system, but this is in turn means that compatibility problems will continue to exist.

Presently the most serious problem facing Icelandic text processing is a code table created for use in European mobile phones. This code-table is only 7-bits but it has added most of the characters needed for the processing of text for the major languages of Western Europe. This code-table does not include accented characters with the exception of é, and not the Thorn and Eth, but the use of hand-held devices for transmitting text has been increasing and Iceland has a very high penetration of GSM phones.

The pressure of modern technology on the use of Icelandic special characters has till this day not had any effect on the Icelandic orthography. On the contrary the widely supported public opinion is that Iceland should not yield to the pressure exerted by the limitations of computer equipment. It is however getting more difficult to finance and implement special solutions for the Icelandic market, as the market for IT equipment is getting fragmented, the state has privatised its "data central" and prices of equipment has lowered. If Icelandic characters and other language specific features do not enter main-stream solutions, they will become too expensive to support.

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Immediate and future challenges

Modern computer technology has made Icelanders aware of some character issues that they were not aware of before.

The Icelandic orthography is the only orthography using the letter Þorn. Of the several hundreds Latin letter in existence, this letter is among a very few that are not simple variation, with strokes, or diacritical marks of the traditional Latin alphabet.

In W-Europe there is noone using the letter ý except Iceland, but in Eastern Europe it is also used by the Czech Republic and Slovakia (both are former Czechoslovakia).

The letters ý and þ pose a special challenge to font makers in that these letters are of full height and also extend ’beyond the line’. This has posed problems when mapping them into low resolution fonts that use a limited number of dots. It can be difficult to squeeze them in the format that other characters use and it is difficult to make a distinction between the capitals and the small version of these letters, the capitals being smaller than the "small" letter. Such low resolution fonts have gone away for use in word-processing, but they will continue to exist in hand-held devices like GSM phones and in grocery stores where prices and names of articles are displayed.

The letter ð is only used in Iceland and in the Faeroe Islands. In Iceland the Eth is conceived to be a variation on the letter d, and to some it is identical to "d with stroke", but the glyph in most fonts can only be interpreted as a variation on the letter o.

Icelanders only recently started to realise that there were other nations using a letter called a "d with stroke" (The Samis, the Croatians, the Vietnamese) and this letter is getting confused with the ð (The capital shape of the two letters Eth and "d with stroke" is identical). There used to be no risk of confusion as the two letters "d with stroke" and Eth have not been present together in any main-stream code-table. In the future there will be a such risk, especially in Scandinavia, where the Samis want to use a d-with stroke for their version of the letter that Rasmus Rask introduced in both the Sami and the Icelandic orthography for the sound of a voiced "th".

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Inputting Icelandic

The shear number of Icelandic special characters has given problems with code table in computers equipment. These problems are likely to go away with larger character sets. There will however continue to be limitations, but they will increasingly be because humans are not capable of inputting/outputting and recognising an un-limited number of characters.

When the Icelandic keyboard standard for computers was made it took as basis the practices and the limitations set by typewriters. There has never been any serious discussion in Iceland on improving this keyboard layout with the aim of making character entry easier and less error prone.

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Voice synthesis and speech recognition

There are hardly any dialects in Iceland, and the pronunciation is relatively close to the written text, in the sense that there is in most cases a one to one correspondence between a phonetic writing of Icelandic and its written orthography.

New technologies are however likely to make the few defects more visible. These are of two kinds. There are instances were the present orthography does not give the distinction present in spoken language, but there are many more instances that the orthography makes distinctions that are not present in the pronunciation of Icelandic.

The "defects" in the orthography are relatively few and will be listed below.

The orthography does not make distinctions between the two words ‘galli’, meaning a flaw and the word ‘galli’ meaning a coat. These word are pronounced as "gaddli" and "gal:i" and there are many more such word pairs using -ll- where the pronunciation cannot be deduced from the spelling. The pronunciation with "ddl" is the more usual for the two l-s and the orthography has been reluctant to mend this flaw. There are a number of reasons for his, such as if the nominative of the word Bíll (an automobile) would be spelled like Bíddl, it would be hard to see its relation to the accusative form of the same word (Bíl). There seems to be no obvious way out of this dilemma and I have seen no serious proposals for mending this.

Having designed an Icelandic voice synthesiser, I can testify that the above problem is the only serious spelling problem associated with converting written text into spoken language. Other problems have to do with word-composites. A voice synthesiser will need a dictionary with a good hyphenation algorithm to realise that a word like ‘fiskafurðir’ is pronounced like "fisk afurðir" and not like "fiska furðir" which gives a very different result.

No attempt has been made to make speech recognition for the Icelandic language, but there the problem will be distinctions made in text that are not made in the pronunciation.

The orthography makes distinctions were the pronunciation does not, for words with y/ý and i/í, such as "synd" and "sind". Icelanders are very much aware of this problem, since words with both y and i are common and the spelling of each has to be memorised. A spell-checker will catch most errors because the number of minimal pairs is very limited (it is hard to find examples like “synd” and “sind”). Konráð Gíslason and many more have proposed that the letters y and ý be dropped from the repertoire of Icelandic characters, but presently there is no support for this.

The orthography makes a distinction in words like hvalir (whales) and kvalir (pain) where modern pronunciation does not. There is however a small percent of Icelanders that still makes the original distinction in the pronunciation of these words and the orthography is therefore likely to keep it.

In many words most Icelanders can neither conceive nor utter a distinction in spoken language, for words spelt with d and t, even if the orthography does so in words like Ratar and Radar. (This was the reason for it being possible to use d for the former þ (or Eth) in a word like Raðar). Words with d-s where t-s should be expected are very few in comparison to words with y or ý and are easy to memorise (the minimal pair Radar-Ratar is actually the only one I could find). A minority of Icelanders pronounce the word Ratar with a t (the IPA "th") while the majority will pronounce it with a d (the IPA "t"). The former are capable of recognising that the word Radar sounds different from Ratar.

The orthography does not spell words with a vowel plus -nk- or -ng- with accented vowels, even if they are pronounced like that. Thus Banki (a bank) is pronounced as if written bánki. There is however no need to make a distinction in the orthography as no word like banki different from bánki exists. There is a small percent of Icelanders that pronounce the word Banki as written. Even if this spelling does not pose a problem to anyone, both Laxness and Konráð Gíslason proposed to change the orthography with respect to this, but got no support.

Top The spelling of historic and Saga documents

I will end this overview of spelling and special letters by reporting on one field of applications where computer technology has already had an impact on the Icelandic orthography.

Until Halldór Laxness had one of the Saga-text published with modern spelling, such text were published using an orthography close to, but not identical to modern Icelandic spelling. One of the main differences was the addition of three variations on o. These are: o with ogonec, o with stroke and the French oe ligature.

This spelling is still being used, but there is a strong tendency to abandon it in favour of the two other alternatives.

1 For scientific use ,to publish the original text as it was actually written.

2 For public consumption, and when standardised spelling is needed, use modern Icelandic spelling.

The second alternative has been strengthened by use of modern computers. The saga texts published for use in schools and for public consumption in Iceland have been made searchable and are available on CD-s which has meant that scientific study of these texts is increasingly being based on the texts as Icelanders would write them today (references needed). Another example are the records of Icelanders from the settlement to present day that have been collected, from all the sources available and the genealogy tables for these that have been made searchable and commercially available. There has been much discussion on ethical aspects of the use of these record, because of their use for DNA research, but the issue of how to spell names of Icelanders through the ages has been a non-issue, modern spelling is always opted for. The same tendency of treating Old-Norse and modern Icelandic as one languages can be seen outside Iceland in the Norwegian school system, where text-books on Old-Norwegian have in some instances been replaced by text-books on modern Icelandic. (I need references on

The alternative of giving the original spelling of the source-documents, has been achieved by publishing books with photographs of manuscripts, but also by publishing their text using modern Latin fonts, with many characters added, some of which are not in any standardised character set. Usually the abbreviations, that are common in medieval manuscripts are decomposed and printed in full within parenthesis, but recently Möðruvallabók has been printed giving all the details of the original spelling, which means that special characters have been made that stretch the concept of a character, such a making a character for a frequent abbreviation sign that can either mean -ar- or -ra-. (references needed) The on-going research of historic Icelandic documents is in its nature very conservative and the potential that computers have, in replacing tedious and error prone human effort for analysing the information in medieval text has not been fully realised, nor has the public become aware of the possibility that it could have access to the actual original information, if it was made processable by computers. The focus in Iceland has been entirely on the need of modern text-processing leaving this field un-attended.

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Appendix A

Simplifications that I have made on the proposals of the First Grammarian

The First grammarian proposed many more vowels than I have listed. I only mentioned two, the o with oconec and e with oconec (which was actually with an accent). The added vowels were six:

1 e with ogonec, with and without an accent

2 ø with and without an accent

3 o with ogonec, with and without an accent

There is no literature preserved that uses all of these vowels. The use that has been found for them, is for poetry preserved from the 9^th -10^th-11^th century, where rhyme sometimes demands all of these distinctions to be made. Modern Icelandic has only use for two vowels (æ, ö) for these six and in fact; most of the preserved medieval and historic texts, need no more.

The First grammarian demonstrated that there were nasalised vowels in Old-Icelandic and he wanted these denoted by using dots in addition to accents above vowels. Even if his information is correct, no manuscripts make use of these dots and poetry does not make any use of the distinction between nasals and non-nasals. The nasal-vowels are therefore not part of any orthography.

The First grammarian ordered all vowels before the consonants. The ordering of vowels, is the following: a, o with ogonec (an u-umlaut of a), e, e with ogonec, i, o, o with stroke, u, y

When ordering vowels with accents or dots, the FG always placed marked vowels after unmarked ones, but he avoids giving the full list of vowels (36 vowels in all!).

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Appendix B

The introduction of the First Grammarian,

using modern Icelandic spelling with English translation after each paragraph:

Í flestum löndum setja menn á bækur annað tveggja þann fróðleik er þar innan lands hefir gerst eða þann annan er minnisamlegastur þykir þó að annars staðar hafi heldur gerst, eða lög sín setja menn á bækur, hver þjóð á sína tungu.

In most countries, men put onto books either the "information" that has "happened" inside that country, or else what is most memorable even if it has happened elsewhere, or men put their law on books, each nation in its own tongue.

En af því að tungurnar eru ólíkar hver annarri, þær þegar er úr einni og hinni sömu tungu hafa gengist eða greinst, þá þarf ólíka stafi í að hafa en eigi hina sömu, alla í öllum. Sem eigi rita Grikkir latínu stöfum grískuna og eigi Latínumenn grískum stöfum latínu né enn heldur hebreskir menn hebreskuna hvorki með grískum stöfum né latínu stöfum, heldur ritar sínum stöfum hver þjóð sína tungu.

But because the languages are different from each other, immediately after they develop or split from a common tongue, they need different letters each, but not the same letters all of them. Like the Greeks do not write Greek with Latin letters, nor is Latin written with Greek letters, nor do the Hebrews write Hebrew with neither Greek nor Latin letters, but each nation writes its tongue with its own letters.

Hverja tungu er maður skal rita annarrar tungu stöfum þá verður sumra stafa vant af þvi að hver tunga hefir hljóð þau er eigi finnast í annarri. Svo ganga og sumir stafir af, af því að eigi finnst það hljóð í tungunni sem stafirnir hafa þeir er af ganga. En þó rita enskir menn enskuna latínustöfum öllum þeir er réttræðir verða í enskunni, en þar er þeir vinnast eigi til þá hafa þeir við aðra stafi svo marga og þesskonar sem þarf en hina taka þeir úr er eigi eru réttræðir í máli þeirra.

In each tongue that a man writes with the letters of another tongue, there will be need for extra letters because each tongue has sounds that are not found in the other. There will also be extra letters not needed because they are for sounds that are not in the tongue. But in spite of this, the English write their English language with Latin letters using those letters that are interpretable in English and when these are not enough they add other letters, as many and of the kind they need, but remove those they cannot interpret.

Nú eftir þeirra dæmum alls vér erum einnar tungu þó at gerst hafi mjög önnur, önnur tveggja, eða nokkuð báðar, til þess að hægra verði að rita og lesa sem nú tíðist og á þessu landi, bæði lög og ættvísi eða þýðingar helgar, eða svo þau in spaklegu fræði er Ari Þorgilsson hefur á bækur sett af skynsamlegu vit, þá hefi ég og ritað oss Íslendingum stafróf, bæði latínustöfum öllum þeim er mér þótti gegna til vors máls vel svo að réttræðir mættu verða og þeim öðrum er mér þótti í þurfa að vera en úr voru teknir þeir er eigi gegna atkvæðum vorrar tungu.

Following their example, as we are of one tongue with them, even if one of the tongues has changed a lot or both have changed somewhat, in order for it to be easier to write and read, as is now common, also in this land, both law, genealogies and holy scripts, or the wise information that Ari Þorgilsson has put on books using good common sense, then I have also written an alphabet for us Icelanders, using both Latin letters that I thought would serve our language well and be interpreted correctly and also other letters that I thought needed to be added, but I have taken out those that do not serve the pronunciation of our tongue.

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